Blocked by a freestanding billboard for decades, the advertisement for Tom Tucker Southern-style Mint Ginger Ale may as well have been unearthed by archaeologists when it arrived out-of-the-blue a few years ago.

A person can still purchase Tom Tucker, but it won’t come in a 32-ounce green glass bottle anymore. Looking every bit the champagne of Southern-style mint ginger ales it is, the big bottle was painted directly onto a two-story brick wall of a row house along Brighton Road probably 60 or 70 years ago.

We deal in ghosts, The Orbit. Ghosts of people that lived here, sure, but ghost houses too. There was an entire ghost neighborhood in Clairton until it disappeared completely. At some point we’ll get to our collections of ghost barbers, ghost taverns, and ghost pharmacies out to the world.

Ghost signs, though—the original “ghosts”! Advertising, from a time before billboards were as ubiquitous as they are now, was created by sign painters directly on the brick walls of buildings in prominent places. We’re lucky so many of them survive and—for the companies that persist, at least—one has to believe it was a solid investment to pay for one wall in 1960 and still have it working for them today.

We’ve got so many ghost sign photos in the backlog that we’re going to break up the collection into some themes. This week: food & drink edition. We’ll get to the other stuff soon.

Soda-Pop … and other beverages

Junk Food Junkies

Flour Power

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Notes:

[1] Cox Distributing still sells cold beer from this location, but the style of sign painting and subsequent meter placement suggest this may be from an older business.

[2] While this Clark Bar ghost sign looks like some holy grail of the genre, Orbit readers informed us it was created for the film Fences which filmed in the Hill District in 2016.

[3] No, you can’t read the name DeMiller’s in this sign, but somehow astute Orbit reader Maggie Ess identified the building as home to the Keystone Potato Chip Co., 6635 Kelly Street, maker of DeMiller’s chips.

[4] Kuhn’s Quality Foods is still very much a going concern with eight stores in the region, but this brick building on Perrysville Ave. no longer hosts one of them.

[5] Reposted from our earlier story Looking for a Lost Little Italy in Larimer.

[6] Macaroni Etc! This W. Boehm Co. “Manufacturers of Mother’s and Excelsior egg noodles, macaroni, and spaghetti” ghost sign twofer was exposed only when a pair of row houses were demolished on Pearl Street in 2021.